Silicon Valleywood

Random Music Review Rant March 21, 2010

Pavement was a big favorite of the early (circa 1998-1999) Jups. The band never did much for me, but that doesn’t prevent me from ranting. Jeez, I didn’t write music reviews this pompous for my college paper:

…Recontextualized as an imperative, the phrase sparks from a lyric on this record’s first track, “Gold Soundz,” a song like a chunk of quartz—jagged angles, splashy jangles, jazzy spangles in the yellow sun. It is a self-doubt song making the best of it as tunefully as its own title arrogantly promises.

“You’re empty and I’m empty, and you can never quarantine the past,” is the lyric. The quick, foxy tail of the Q slides into a verb carrying the squawk of official alarm. The phrase is a mouthful for a marketing department to choke on. It is syncopated to measure the gravity of nostalgia and the pull against it, indicative of a lyrical voice that is often of several minds about any number of things, settling on ambiguity as a controlling idea and ambivalence as a point of view, cultivating a double-negative capability.